The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  And then somehow he is up in the F train, riding the elevated tracks out of the Smith-Ninth Street station, and he is an adult again, clad in his work clothes, and the train comes around the bend high above Red Hook, and he sees dark storm clouds marching across the harbor, above the Statue of Liberty. The train starts to head down into the tunnel before Carroll Street, and Jack begins to panic: something bad is heading toward the city, something very bad—it involves radiation—and he is desperate: he must find Ben and make sure the boy is safe. Then he notices that his son is in the same subway car, sitting farther down, and Jack feels better, but then his heart jolts again. Michelle! His girlfriend is in the city, at work, and he has to reach her, to rescue her…

  HIS EYES JOLTED OPEN. Morning sun. He was lying on his couch; in his bedroom, the alarm clock was going off. He couldn’t get up though, not right away. The dreams were still with him, and he felt bruised, as if he had taken several punches to the face.

  Michelle again. He didn’t even know where she was living these days, since that fateful night when she had bolted from the restaurant. He both dreaded and hoped that he would run into her someday. New York was a city of eight million people, but it still happened all the time—you turned a corner and bumped into somebody who had been your best friend in third grade, or some distant relative you hadn’t seen for years. Someday when he least expected it, he was going to look up and see her striding through a crowd.

  When that happened, how would he behave? Would he just act out of hurt and anger and say something cruel? Or was it possible that somewhere, deep down inside, he might be able to find a small kernel of forgiveness?

  He had no idea.

  He ran a hand over his face, and then he swung his feet over the side of the couch and stood up to face the new day.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ON THE OUTSIDE, THE Seven-oh house looked a bit grander than most, with its beige stone façade, its arched front windows. On the inside, it was like every precinct headquarters in the city: anxious, beaten-down citizens sitting in the waiting area; a beefy, supremely unfazeable sergeant planted like a bullfrog behind the front counter; everything pervaded by a smoggy atmosphere of hope fading into despair.

  Jack found Richie Powker sitting at his desk up in the detective’s squad room, which was crammed full of gray desks and filing cabinets and the journeymen and women of the investigative trade. The detective had a little burrow over in the corner, dug out of stacks of manila folders, old newspapers, and mug shot books. He barely looked up when Jack walked in; he was hunched over, staring intently at his computer screen.

  “What’s up?” Jack said.

  Richie didn’t answer at first; he typed something in and waited a moment. Then he leaned in closer to the screen.

  “What’cha doin?”

  The detective looked up. “I’ve been casting the net out there. Remember what you were talking about, how our guy went shopping in the A.M.? How he might have some night job, like a cabbie? We’ve sure got a lot of Pakistani drivers living around here. I’ve been looking through a database from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Take a look at this.”

  Jack came around the desk and saw a driver’s license up on the screen: a male, thirty-four years old, with black hair and a rather severe brown face. He peered closer; he hated to admit it, but even for a veteran detective it was often harder to identify suspects of other races. Blacks and Asians condemned it all the time, this “they all look alike” mentality, but he had seen scientific studies about the phenomenon, known as the cross-race effect: people of all races were usually better at identifying differences in facial features among members of their own group.

  It certainly didn’t help when you were trying to work from two-day-old memories of a grainy little security video.

  “The age and height seem right,” Richie said. “I think it could be our guy. Whaddaya think?”

  Jack exhaled. “I don’t know. It could be …”

  “This is interesting.” Richie tapped at his keyboard, then pointed at a new screen. “It says here that several passengers registered complaints about this hack. I looked into it: he’s been brought up on charges a couple of times.”

  Jack frowned. “The perp’s fingerprints didn’t turn up on any criminal database.”

  “I know—but these are just TLC hearings, not court cases.”

  “What was he brought up on?”

  Richie gave Jack a significant look. “It seems he has a bit of a nasty temper—and a tendency to pick fights. Oh—and he lives five blocks from our deli.”

  THEY TOOK BACKUP WITH them, two other detectives from the Seven-oh, tagging along in an unmarked Dodge Charger. First they stopped off at the hack’s home address and warily approached the front stoop. It was a small brick row house with garish chrome railings. No one answered the bell.

  Next stop: the place of employment. The taxi office was on a small side street just off Coney Island Avenue, next to a shoe repair shop and a little Mexican bakery. Jack and his partner parked twenty yards down the street and got out of their car, while the other detectives remained in their vehicle at the far end of the block, keeping an eye on the incoming traffic.

  The bakery had a picture window full of birthday cakes topped with plastic princesses and Power Rangers; as he walked by, Jack inhaled an inviting sweet scent tinged with cinnamon. Then came a high chain-link fence topped with one meager strand of barbed wire, enclosing an asphalt lot which held three yellow cabs, with spaces for maybe five or six more. Next to it stood a small open-doored garage and a freestanding little office. Jack knew that its modest appearance didn’t mean that the business was not worth much: every cab had to bear a licensing medallion, and each of those cost around four hundred grand.

  A mechanic in oily overalls, a compact brown man whose biceps bulged beneath his cutoff shirtsleeves, stared out at the detectives from the shade inside the garage. They ignored him and proceeded into the office, a small, grubby room made smaller because it contained a Plexiglas-protected booth, inside of which sat the dispatcher, a plump man with a pockmarked face and heavy black eyebrows.

  He looked up at them, took in their sports jackets and their confident demeanor. Jack, a relatively small man of Russian Jewish heritage, could often pass for a civilian, but Richie carried the meaty look of a law enforcement officer in his very genes.

  “TLC?” the dispatcher said. He didn’t exactly look surprised, and Jack thought of his driver’s previous run-ins with the Taxi and Limo Commission.

  Jack pulled out his badge. “NYPD. You own this business?”

  The dispatcher nodded.

  “We need to talk to you about one of your drivers.” Jack held up a computer printout of their suspect’s driver’s license.

  “What is this about?”

  “It’s a routine matter. We just need to ask him a couple of questions.”

  The dispatcher frowned. “He’ll be done around eight.”

  Jack held his ground. “We need him now. Would you please call him in?”

  The dispatcher considered the request for a moment, then shrugged. His thought process was so obvious that it was almost visible: he could put up a fuss and risk getting hassled himself, or he could cooperate. And why not? The drivers worked freelance; if they got into trouble with the law, that was their problem.

  The man reached out, pressed something, and spoke into his headset, rapidly, in Urdu. Jack hoped he wasn’t warning their suspect away.

  The dispatcher looked up. “He just dropped a fare at the airport. He’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  Jack smiled. It was at least a twenty-five or thirty-minute trip to the nearest airport, but the dispatcher bullshitted by sheer force of habit.

  The two detectives sat down on bare metal folding chairs.

  “I love what they’ve done with the place,” Richie muttered. The office was depressing: cigarette-burned wall-to-wall carpet, not a single picture or other decoration, just a little pile of well-thumb
ed foreign movie magazines. “You think our guy might be armed?” the detective wondered. “I know he doesn’t own a registered piece.”

  Jack shrugged. “Maybe he’s got another can of beans.”

  Richie snorted. “We should’a went out and bought some hot dogs. We could have ourselves a barbecue.” The detective sat back and clasped his hands across his ample stomach. His eyelids drooped. A true veteran: they were awaiting a possible murder suspect, but the man stayed calm.

  Jack glanced at his watch. Restless, he resisted an urge to flip through one of the foreign magazines. He knew the backup would call if they spotted anyone approaching the office, but he kept his eyes fixed on the little front window.

  Finally, his cell phone vibrated. He glanced at its little screen, nudged Richie, pulled out his gun, stood up, and moved to the side of the door.

  A shadow moved past the window.

  The door swung open, revealing the face of the driver in the photo. The Pakistani peered in at the two detectives. He started to turn but saw the others closing in behind. And then he bolted, not back toward the street but straight ahead, into the office, knocking Richie aside, darting around Jack like a football running back, yanking open a side door, and hurling himself through. The detectives exchanged startled looks, then rushed after him.

  Out in the lot, their quarry careened about like an animal in a trap. The fence designed to keep thieves out proved quite suitable for keeping murder suspects in.

  The mechanic stepped outside the garage, but when he saw four cops with guns drawn, he raised his hands and stopped still.

  The suspect dashed around behind the parked taxis. He scrambled up on the hood of one, then hurled himself high onto the fence at the back of the lot. He scrabbled to the top but got caught in the barbed wire, where he was suspended, gasping and struggling.

  Gotcha, Jack said to himself. He turned back to the mechanic. “We’re gonna need to borrow some bolt cutters.” Once he got the tool, he turned to one of the other detectives from the Seven-oh house, a wiry young guy who looked like he spent a lot of time at the gym. Without a word, grinning, the DT took the cutters from Jack and started climbing.

  A minute later the detectives had their suspect pressed, panting, against the hood of a taxi. One of the Seven-oh detectives cuffed him.

  “Fahad Marashi,” Richie said to him, “you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I HAVE APPLIED,” THE suspect said, bearing an expression of great anguish. “I have applied, and applied, and applied.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jack said patiently.

  He and Richie were standing in a drab little interview room over at the Seven-oh house.

  “I don’t want to be illegal,” the driver said. “I wish to vote, pay taxes, all of this.”

  “You want to pay taxes,” Richie said, grinning. “Well, that’s a great start for an honest interview!”

  Jack had zero interest in their suspect’s citizenship status, but it seemed like it might make a useful bargaining chip. He sat down and clasped his hands together. “Monday. In the morning. What were you doing over at the S & R deli on Coney Island Avenue?” Don’t ask the suspect if he was there; ask why he was there. Let the guy at least place himself at the scene.

  But Fahad Marashi’s eyes widened. “Monday? Monday you are asking me about? I was in Charlottesville, Virginia! For my cousin’s wedding! He works at the university, in the mathematics program.”

  Richie scratched his ear. “You have any proof of that? Witnesses? A bus ticket?”

  Marashi brightened. “Witnesses, tickets, yes! And I can show you photos, on the Internet!”

  “Why’d you run then, when you came into the taxi office just now?”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Why did I run? Because you were chasing me!”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to confirm Marashi’s alibi. And then Jack and his partner stood outside the precinct house and watched the cabbie stride quickly, joyously away. They were on a homicide case and could not be bothered with immigration matters. What the hell, a hardworking guy—why bust his chops? The detectives took their setback philosophically. A lead didn’t pan out? Just part of the job. Adios, amigo. Vaya con dios.

  Jack shrugged. “Let’s do Plates at the Scene.” On a busy thoroughfare like Coney Island Avenue, at rush hour, someone must have seen their perpetrator walk out of the deli, likely with bloodstained clothes. As part of their routine that first day, the detectives had jotted down the license plate numbers of any cars parked outside. Now they would begin the tedious job of tracking down the drivers, asking if anyone had been near the scene at the time of the murder. Criminal investigations, even of homicides, were rarely glamorous; they tended to involve a lot of slogging along, poring through files, canvassing for witnesses, praying that some small, significant detail might pop out of the mundane mass. After almost two decades as a detective—with Homicide, with Robbery, with other units—Jack knew that full well, but still, by the end of the tour, he was nearly cross-eyed with the tedium of the task.

  “You wanna grab a beer?” Richie asked, standing up and throwing his sports jacket over one shoulder.

  Jack thought about going home to his empty apartment, about watching TV while eating cheap takeout food. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  THEY WENT OVER TO Monsalvo’s, a little bunker of a place Jack sometimes visited on the edge of Midwood. It was far from any precinct house, so he didn’t have to listen to shop talk after work; he could just park himself on a stool like the resident old-timers and watch a ball game in peace.

  Pat stood behind the stick, a ruddy-faced young man, son of Pat Senior, the night barkeep. The dim interior was lit by a couple of neon beer signs, a string of Christmas tree lights, and old TVs above each end of the bar; their light flickered in the big glassy eyeballs of a deer head mounted on the back wall. On a shelf above the register, some little statuettes—Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields—stood patiently underneath a Spanish moss—like coating of dust.

  “A couple of cold ones,” Jack called out, but Richie overruled him.

  “Just a seltzer for me. With a squeeze a’ lime.”

  Jack didn’t say anything—a man’s drinking habits were his business and his alone—but he couldn’t help cocking an eyebrow.

  “I don’t drink,” Richie said. “It’s not an AA thing or anything. I just don’t go for the stuff.” He smiled ruefully and pointed at his face. “I know: the nose fools ya.”

  Jack did his best to avoid comparing it to the veiny, bulbous schnoz on W. C. Fields.

  “It’s not drinking,” Richie said. “It’s a skin condition. It’s called rosacea. Millions of people have it. And everybody assumes we love the sauce.”

  “Well, that sounds like a drag,” Jack said.

  Richie shrugged. “Hey—it ain’t fatal. But it is a bit of a curse. If it wasn’t for this, I would’a made commissioner by now.” He laughed at his own joke, causing a couple of old-timers at the far end of the bar to tear their gazes away from the TV. Pat delivered a pint of seltzer; Richie raised it and began to declaim:

  Here’s to the camel, whose sexual desire

  Is greater than anyone thinks.

  One night in a moment of madness

  It tried to make love to the Sphinx.

  But the Sphinx’s posterior opening

  Was clogged with the sands of the Nile,

  Which accounts for the hump on the camel

  And the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile.

  The old-timers set down their beers and clapped.

  Richie bowed. “Just ’cause I don’t drink doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good toast.”

  Predictably, this set off old regular Tommy McKettrie, a wrinkled, long-retired bus driver sitting a few stools down. He stood gravely, adjusted an imaginary necktie, and raised his glass of whiskey. “Here’s to the bee that stung the bull, that started
the bull to bucking. Here’s to Adam who ate the first apple, and started the whole world to—”

  “Eating apples,” Pat stepped in, dryly fulfilling his role in the miniature ongoing drama that was Monsalvo’s.

  Richie grinned. “I like this joint.”

  Pat shrugged and wiped the bar with a wet rag. “We can’t all have good judgment.” One of the old-timers signaled and he went off down the bar.

  “So,” Richie said to Jack. “If I remember correctly, I’ll only be graced with your presence for a little bit longer.”

  Jack nodded. “I have a couple more days to work exclusively on this.” That was the way it worked: the Homicide Task Force detectives got assigned a certain number of days to work a fresh case with the local precinct detectives, and then they had to go back into the squad’s rotation, subject to catching fresh murders. “But I’ll still help out whenever I have time.” Jack took a sip of his beer and snorted. “Like I’ve already provided such invaluable assistance.”

  Richie shrugged. “Some cases are easy; some ain’t. We don’t get to pick and choose.”

  Jack nodded. “You got that right. You know what this case reminds me of? I had a job, a little while back, we had a gun that went overboard from a boat and we had to call in the Harbor Unit. The scubas went in; they’ve got this thing called a rope line. It’s murky as hell down there at the bottom, and apparently you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. So they stretch out this rope, maybe a hundred feet, and then they move along it, holding onto it with one hand. With the other, they just grope around.”

  Richie nodded. “Sure sounds like our situation right now.”

  Jack made a face. “The thing is, it seems to me that this Charlson fella is up there on the surface, with a really nice sonar unit.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe that this department rivalry crap still goes on.”